Changing default locale for Java in Windows

I was trying to test something for a different locale and make the mistake of assuming that what I did actually changed it for java without confirming it. I smartened up and actually tested it and lo and behold it didn't actually change it. The correct way is to go to Control Panel -> Regional and Language Options, then update the Standards and formats to the desired language and click Apply. If you run a Java program to check out the default locale it will show the new locale.

Mixing horizontal menu styles

In dealing with my horizontal menu issues and finding issues with item wrapping in Firefox when trying to use display:inline and then hitting up against the infamous z-index issue with IE (nicely explained over at mahzeh.org) when trying to use float I decided to experiment with using both. By default (since it is generally IE that is the culprit) I set things up to use float. Then I use some hacking tags to identify specific IE versions and set float:none which then makes use of the display:inline tag. This seems to work fairly nicely and avoided me having to change the structure of things too much or add a bunch of javascript to get z-index to behave.

Firefox issue with wrapping in horizontal menu

So I've been trying to make some modifications to a style sheet to get around some funny mapping that is happening when the items get too long. Unfortunately the CSS has gotten pretty complex and looks like it could stand for some refactoring, but I was able to distill out something that I didn't expect for behavior from firefox. Here's what is happening with the menu wrapping that just isn't right:



Then menu consists of an unordered list and list items that each contain a sublist. The quirk of this menu that I'm not used to seeing is the list items for the main menu are organized using display: inline and white-space: nowrap. As it turns out the offending line was in the html file.

<li class="mi-top">
Third Menu

Once I remove any white space from between the > and the "T" everything is fine. My understanding is that it should ignore any line feeds inside of the li tag. I'm going to switch this over to using floats instead of display: inline to see if that will take care of the issue as well.

9/17/2008 - Float followup: Floats took care of it without having to worry about the white space.